U of Texas, Austin film prof John Pierson, who wrote Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, used the anti-Michael Moore docu Manufacturing Dissent to teach his film students. They were disillusioned about Moore after seeing the film, he writes in an open letter to Moore in Indiewire.

I saw Manufacturing Dissent before I did the first interview with Moore, published during Cannes. There are some embarrassing revelations in the docu, which shows all too clearly that Moore doesn't mind bending the truth to make his point. He's a little like Orson Welles in Touch of Evil; he'll use any means to get his man.

Clearly, though, Moore has matured. When I saw Sicko I forgave him his past trespasses. He is on the side of the angels on this one. The man cares about these causes (even if he drives the folks who have to work with him crazy).

UPDATE: Moore is laughing all the way to the bank with Sicko.

ABC film critic Joel Siegel has died at age 63 of colon cancer, which he had been fighting for six years. I got to know Siegel two years ago on the Red Carpet at the Academy Awards when he, Leonard Maltin and I dished about the Oscar race for the Road to the Oscars preshow. The three of us had a blast as we hung out and rehearsed and then went live on Oscar night. He was very kind to me. Damn.

Dana Harris has chosen a winner in her Best Food Movies contest at The Knife. She has also posted a bunch of cool food trailers. Here are my top ten food movies:

1. Cousin, Cousine
2. Babette's Feast
3. Tampopo
4. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
5. Tom Jones
6. Ratatouille
7. Bread and Chocolate
8. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
9. Waitress
10. Big Night

Your votes?

UPDATE: I forgot Like Water for Chocolate and Chocolat and Mostly Martha— a remake, No Reservations, starring Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Zeta-Jones, is coming up soon. Here's Carrie Rickey's riff on food movies.

I saw Hairspray last weekend and I don't disagree with the main points in Variety's review, although I clearly enjoyed the performances by John Travolta, Christopher Walken and Michele Pfeiffer more than this reviewer did. (That said, Travolta does not hit this out of the park the way you want him to, given who he is. His performance is restrained, muted, somehow.) Truth is, no one has ever played Edna Turnblad better than Divine did in the John Waters original. Ben Stiller's dad, Jerry, who played Wilbur, cameos in the 2007 version.

While New Line Cinema is nervous about opening this 60s period movie musical on July 20 against the summer onslaught, it should be effective counterprogramming because it is a total crowd-pleaser. It's the kind of movie that puts a smile on your face and leaves it there. And most important, after such duds as The Producers, Rent, and Phantom of the Opera, it should prove that the movie musical is alive and well. It works!

I will always have a fond spot in my heart for John Waters, not only because he's cool, funny, and a really nice man, but because when I worked for Film Comment back in New York, David Chute did such a brilliant job on his Waters profile that I fell in love with the writer who eventually became Nora's father. I never would have left NYC otherwise. Waters came to our wedding, and gave Nora the sweetest white knitted sweater when she was born. And I always look forward to the beginning of the holiday season, which is marked by his tasteless Christmas cards.

Today is the Day for "Sicko" June 29, 2007

Friends,

This is it! Two years in the making! The day that our new film, "Sicko," arrives in theaters all across North America! Click here to see where the nearest one is to you.

After you go, let me know what you think. Oh, and send us a photo or a video from your cell phone to show us what it looked like at your theater. We'd love to post a photo from each of the 440 movie theaters showing "Sicko."

To read more about the movie, you can go to MichaelMoore.com.

Here's what this morning's review in the L.A. Times said: "It's likely his most important, most impressive, and most provocative film." Okay, what do they know? I prefer to trust the assessment of E! Television Online: " 'Sicko' - the best movie ever? Maybe." Maybe? MAYBE?! When will they ever give me a break?

It's been a weirdly funny week. First Larry King bumped me for Paris Hilton. Then today, when CNBC invited me to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for an interview, the stock exchange said I was barred from the building. On top of that, Tony Blair is gone, Cheney says he's no longer answerable to anyone's elected government, and I simply don't want an iPhone. Just another week in America.

Hope you enjoy the movie!

Yours,
Michael Moore

Check out MoveOn.Org's Sicko promo email on the jump:

Luke Y. Thompson

A.J. Schnack

David Lowery

Doug Cummings at Film Journey.

Spout previews the Con, coming up at the end of July in San Diego. We'll be blogging from there. Although anyone making up their mind now to go--good luck finding a room nearby.

I had fun moderating the blogging panel poolside at the W. From right, Sasha Stone of Awards Daily, Kate Coe of Fishbowl LA, Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere and I all agreed that we are obsessed; speed is of the essence, although, Stone said, one can always throw something up fast and tweak it later.

Stone is a stay-at-home blogger with kids who started Oscarwatch out of her own passion for tracking the Oscars. Now it's a year-round thing with big traffic. She sells ads and has helpers. No one tells her what to do, although the Academy forced her to give up her name. She feels strongly, as do I, that she should stay away from putting promo spin on the blog. So she avoids the PR machine. She wants to remain objective, although she certainly makes clear her own rooting interests, especially close to Oscar night. She scours the news and posts from an Oscar perspective.

Coe is a sharp-witted industry pro who produces for TV. Mediabistro, the journalists' website, pays her by the post to blog, which she happily does, obsessively. (We met through our mutual blogging mentor, the late great Cathy Seipp.) Coe's a local media watcher, like sober-minded Kevin Roderick of LA Observed, her main competition. But she's willing to admit that posts leading off with "Britney Spears" do grab traffic.

Wells has been in and out of entertainment print journalism in NY (where I met him in the late 70s) and LA, and moved over to the online side some years ago, as a paid columnist for several sites, including Kevin Smith's moviepoopshoot.com. Wells started his own site, finally, figured out that the blogging format attracts more readers, and sells ads, especially during Oscar season. He's making a living and averages about 10,000 hits a day. He's built a real community of lively commenters. Wells admits that he can get up in the morning, go to the computer and look up at 3 wondering where the day went. I too described a cone of silence that falls when I really get into the blog zone.

Stone and I agreed that the entertainment blogosphere has gotten over-saturated; you can go from blog to blog reading all the same stuff. That's why, while I understand the need for speed, just throwing stuff up isn't always enough. Sometimes I wait for inspiration to hit, for several things to relate to one another, for a juicy angle that will distinguish my take from all the others.

Wells described his main rival, Movie City News' David Poland, as bossy and self-righteous, someone who likes to tell other people how things should be done. Last night Poland told me he would neither share a panel with Wells, nor even read his blog, because Wells has burned him so many times. As if we didn't know, their relationship has turned rancorous. The LAFF cut us off just as the fur started to fly, because they were losing the light.

Here's the report from Indiewire; Awards Daily; fishbowl la; and Hollywood Elsewhere. UPDATE: Here's Craig Kennedy.

John Anderson went to the LAFF screening I missed and reviewed the fest's most-buzzed about documentary: Young @ Heart. Working Title has already picked up the movie rights to this story of swinging singing seniors.

This trailer for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises looks scary, romantic, sexy, thrilling. That's what they're selling. I'll be curious to see what Cronenberg fills in between the lines.

Imagine my pal Jane's discomfort when she bought organic blueberries at her local farmer's market—and found a picture of a rat on the plastic container.

"It's Disney Garden produce, to promote Ratatouille," I said.

"It's a rat!" she replied. She hasn't seen the movie yet.

Brad Bird and Pixar make the movie's lead-rat chef cuddly, pink-nosed and adorable. He even washes his hands before he prepares his gourmet food. Pixar animators devoted years of study with San Francisco's top chefs as they prepped the movie. UPDATE: Here's a NYT video of Bird talking about how he made the movie.

NYT tech columnist David Pogue creates a video preview of his first intro to Apple's much-anticipated iPhone. I still want one! The biggest negative: like many companies, my office doesn't support them. Variety's strictly-PC universe issues what I used to consider very posh BlackBerries. Check this out.

Transformers took over Westwood last night, playing on multiple screens with crowds jamming Broxton Avenue will-call tables and an after-party on the street.

Transformers looks really expensive. The ILM and Digital Domain effects are extraordinarily complex, with countless huge robots changing forms like rippling rubics' cubes. Some are bad guys (Megatron!), some are good guys (Optimus Prime!), and for some reason they choose to travel as shiny trucks and cars rather than fly. My fave Transformer is Bumblebee, who initially befriends our hero (well-played by Shia LaBeouf) in the form of a yellow Camaro (his first car), and I actually choked up when Bumblebee suffers in the line of battle.

Bay said he enjoyed working every day with the animators, recording voices, making changes, fixing this and enhancing that. They did great work here. Undeniably, Bay has a great eye: there are some amazing action sequences and shots, including some cool real-life locations, exterior and interior, at the Hoover Dam.

Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura said it became a macho game for the filmmakers to prove that they could shoot a movie on this scale in L.A. for less than $150 million. DreamWorks' Stacey Snider insisted that the movie cost less than $150 million. Producer Don Murphy quoted $147 million. Bay grabbed my arm and bet me $2000 that it cost less than $150 million. "Make that $5000!" he said.

"They only went a little bit over," said one Paramount executive. The studio certainly scrimped on the party menu: they served July 4th finger food, Burger King burgers and fries, and ice cream.

Transformers works because Bay channeling Spielberg is a good thing. Some of the touches that one might ascribe to Spielberg were actually Bay's, including a moment when a little girl (who looks like Drew Barrymore in E.T.), sees a Transformer in her back yard and asks him if he's the tooth fairy.

The script is charming and comedic and the first 2/3 of the movie is great fun. I am not the target audience for this, so the climactic battles wore me out. The sheer pixel-packed scale of these relentless images tires the eyes. Transformers will score big with men: manly soldiers fight well for the side, the president is incompetent, the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) is ineffectual; as always, John Turturro makes an entertaining villain; and the two femme leads are silly, sexy babes.

Was Bay trying to drive women away? The way I hear it, his wishes carried the day: this is how he sees women. "They look like they're about to display their thongs," commented Nora. She loved the movie, and adores LaBeouf. We didn't spot him in the crowd, but we did see Superman star Bryan Routh, looking slim and unbuff. Nora wanted to know why so many reality stars were invited. I didn't recognize any of them.

Paramount distribution chief Jim Tharpe and marketing head Gerry Rich looked remarkably relaxed, mainly because they're spending a fortune to open Transformers, and its six-day holiday weekend launch makes it harder to measure against other openings. As a non-sequel, it's not expected to be a record-breaker anyway.

Safe to say Transformers is not The Island. One nugget I gleaned last night: Michael Bay is such a big name in Korea that The Island did great business there.

I finally have a Harry Potter screening invite. Here's an early review from the London Times out of the Tokyo premiere:

The film itself is a solid, occasionally spectacular, wizarding romp which struggles unsuccessfully to give us the thrills and fun we have not already had in previous instalments. It is far crueler than its predecessors and begins to introduce properly the idea that we are no longer in an amusing magical playground, but are en route to an epic confrontation with real victims.

UPDATE: Here's Variety's review. Stephen Schaefer saw the film in London.

Joe Wright's film version of Ian McEwan's Atonement, starring his swan-necked Pride and Prejudice gal, Keira Knightley, will debut at the Venice Fest.

Reminding us of the cyclical nature of the film biz, Atonement is one of four Focus Features Oscar-chasers this award season. (Focus had a relatively quiet 2006.) The others are Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and Terry George's Reservation Road. The New Yorker review of Evening suggests that, as I suspected, only actress Vanessa Redgrave will survive as an Evening Oscar contender. Meryl Streep doesn't have enough screen time, as marvelous as she is--possibly Clare Danes. Unless the movie collapses.

This year's fall season is intensely dense--about 24 pics a month will open. Which films will cut through that clutter? Fests Telluride, Venice, Toronto, and New York will act as early filters. The announcement that Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited, for example will open New York on September 28 is a big boost for that Fox Searchlight movie. (The Coens No Country for Old Men will likely not only play NY and Toronto but Telluride as well.) An opening night slot precludes the film from playing other fests. Other NYFF opening nighters that went on to Oscar contention include About Schmidt, Mystic River, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Queen.

Adding a picture to the late-year race is a calculated risk at this point. See Tim Gray's Oscar story.

GreenCine Daily's David Hudson, who is based in Berlin, explains what is really going on with the German government vs. Tom Cruise. According to this story, Cruise isn't banned from filming Valkyrie in Germany after all.

As the movie business slowly moves away from the outmoded inflated big-studio model, momentum is starting to shift to the stand-alone indies that are in a position to deliver to the studios high-quality mid-range commercial pictures for a price. Of course that's easier said than done. And many folks are having the same idea at the same time. So will ex-Miramax and Warner Indie Pictures exec Mark Gill and partner Neil Sacker, ex of the Bob Yari Group as well as Miramax, be able to pull off their new financing and production co. The Film Department, which they've raised $200 million to launch?

I'm betting they have a good shot--alongside Michael London's Groundswell, Tom Rosenberg's Lakeshore, Joe Drake's Mandate and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Yes, there's a glut of projects out there. But CEO Gill insists that they have the expertise to make six films a year between $10 and 35 million that will rise above the bottomfeeders. "Yes, there are plenty of films that are unreleasable," he says. "There are never enough movies that are good. Our films will eventually have to play on 1000 to 1500 screens."

He doesn't have to worry about competing with distributors for acquisitions pickings. The Film Dept. is going to make the pictures everybody is hungry to buy--and unlike Groundswell, they boast a foreign sales operation. That key executive will be announced shortly.

Now that they have real bucks to play with, Gill and prexy and COO Sacker, who will function as full partners, will start nailing down some attractive film packages that lack financing. "We don't need a distributor before we get started," Gill points out. They're aiming to hire about 38 employees.

As far as aiming for the Oscar market, which they learned well at Miramax, Gill figures in the end about half of their films will wind up boasting Oscar potential. For his part, Sacker doesn't plan to put out pure artistic exercises aimed at the Academy crowd. He prefers the Crash model, he said, which is a "commercial and artistic entertainment."

John Sayles' new movie Honeydripper features a blues band; Emerging Pictures is releasing the pic late this year. Here's a clip of the film's house band, The Honeydripper All-Star Band, starring actor/musician Gary Clark Jr., performing at the River-to-River Festival in lower Manhattan. The band is touring blues fests this summer:

UPDATE: Honeydripper will make its debut at TIFF.

The LAT's multi-talented John Horn whipped out a video camera to shoot Michael Moore as he attended his Skid Row premiere of Sicko in downtown L.A.

Variety's David Cohen wrote a terrific piece last month on the pressures facing VFX movies and the houses that make them possible. FX Guide interviews him on the toll blockbusters are taking on VFX.

Here's the release on today's Humanitas Prize winners:

The 33rd HUMANITAS Prize winners are: Feature Film Category ($25,000) - *tie

FREEDOM WRITERS Screenplay by: Richard LaGravenese (Paramount Pictures)
The story of inner-city kids raised on drive-by shootings and hard-core gang violence and the teacher who gives them a voice. Cited "for its fervent belief that one person can change the lives of our most important asset: our children."

VENUS Written by: Hanif Kureishi (Miramax Films)
When Ian's sullen and cheeky grandniece shows up, Maurice is captivated by her youth and her dour charm and shows her around London, making him aware of his loneliness and old age. Cited "for its insistence on human dignity and emotional honesty when faced with the painful humiliations and deprivations that can come with aging."

90 Minute Category ($25,000)

LONGFORD Written by: Peter Morgan (HBO Films)
Based on the life of a British Lord, Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, and his friendship with child killer Myra Hindley. Cited "for its passionate belief that everyone deserves forgiveness -- as much for them as for ourselves."

So far, it looks like the following films are set for the Toronto International Film Fest in September:

Opener September 6: Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces
Roger Spottiswoode's Rwandan drama Shake Hands with the Devil
The Coens' No Country for Old Men (Cannes)
Hou Hsiao-hsien The Flight of the Red Balloon (Cannes)
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Cannes Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
The closer for September 15 is still to come.

While I was going toe-to-toe with Harvey Weinstein at Cannes, it seems, Fortune's Tim Arango was dancing the two-step with him as well. The Fortune piece closed before the good boxoffice opening for 1408, and the previews of Sicko, which look impressive.

We covered a lot of the same ground. But Arango's recent reporting has unearthed the discovery that The Weinstein Co. board of directors is exercising more oversight and may insist on the appointment of what board member Tarak Ben Ammar calls "a CEO" to oversee the company; naturally the Weinsteins are in full spin control, as this Page Six item shows:

HARVEY Weinstein admitted yesterday, "We were idiots" for combining two movies into the 31/2-hour "Grindhouse," which bombed at the box office. But he was ebullient over the $20 million weekend take of "1408," his horror flick starring John Cusack, and sold-out previews of "Sicko." Weinstein was in full spin control after a Fortune article quoted Tarak Ben Ammar, a Weinstein Co. board member, as saying, "This fiscal year has been a disappointing one." Ammar told us from his yacht in the Mediterranean, "I'm less disappointed than Harvey is himself." Weinstein said he's still making higher profits than the major studios: "It's only disappointing compared to our track record."

Perhaps the Weinsteins may have less control over their board than they'd like to think.

TMZ's Harvey Levin has become as powerful in Hollywood as Walter Winchell, writes the NYT. The Mel Gibson DUI rant alerted me to TMZ, which is the future of online journalism. I wrote a story on Levin, who has a strong relationship with L.A. County Sheriff Lee Bacca, last year:

Harvey Levin COMPANY: Managing editor, TMZ.com WHY: A year ago, Levin figured out that if he posted well-reported breaking celebrity news stories on the Internet, many eyeballs would come -- and so would burgeoning ad revenue.

BACK STORY: "I'm a mut," says the veteran creator/executive producer of Telepictures Prods.' syndicated TV show "Celebrity Justice," which lasted four seasons. "I'm a TV guy, I'm not going to the Internet," he said when he was first approached to start a Web site. But then Levin recalled his frustration on "Celebrity Justice" when they'd be forced to break news on their Web site that they couldn't break on the TV show. "People never thought the Internet could ever be a competitive news source," he says. But just as Levin was about to sign a deal with another network, it struck him that he could make a Web site into "a real functioning news organization," he says, "not (like) Slate (.com). More about breaking news and enterprise stories." He eventually pitched the idea for TMZ.com as the first co-venture between Warner Bros.-owned Telepictures and AOL. "I was banking on AOL's ability to drive traffic and Telepictures' ability to pro